From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Oct 24 16: 4:30 2000
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To: John.Place@rrd.com
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Anonymous FTP and Symlinks 
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 24 Oct 2000 23:51:26 +0300.
             <20001024235125.B6932@hades.hell.gr> 
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 16:04:25 -0700
From: David Harnick-Shapiro <davidhs@intelenet.net>
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On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 23:51, Giorgos Keramidas writes:

> On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 01:20:33PM -0500, John.Place@rrd.com wrote:
>
>> I am changing platforms for an _INTERNAL_ ftp server (to freebsd of corse).
>> The old platform (QNX) allowed me to set symlinks and they would be
>> followed.  FreeBSD will not.  I realize that this is because of
>> security purposes that it is like this but I am trying to make a
>> seemless change of platforms and some users will have a problem with
>> this.  Is there a way I can force ftpd to honor symlinks?
> 
> I think that it's not possible.  This is because ftpd (the one included
> with FreeBSD and some of the others that I know of), will call chroot()
> and change their `/' directory to the home of the "ftp" user when
> anonymous ftp is used.

I may have missed something here, but why not just use relative,
instead of absolute, symlinks?  As long as the target file and
the directory you're ftp-ing from have the same relationship to
each other under the "real" root and the chroot-ed root, that
should work.

For example, if /home/user1/ftpdir/mylink is a symlink to
"/home/user2/ftpdir/realfile", and you chroot to /home, that
path breaks.  But if mylink is a symlink to
../../user2/ftpdir/realfile, that path works in both cases.
(In the normal case, ../.. is "/home", and in the chrooted case,
../.. is "/", but it works in each case.)

David H-S


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